THE COMING REFORM BILL.
17 RE prospect of a new Reform Bill has not excited the country as much as the Prime Minister possibly expected when he made the announcement. The classes who at one time were interested in former Reform Bills now have their minds turned in other directions. Formerly some lowering of the franchise was regarded as the necessary prelude to legislation involving large Constitutional or social changes. Before the House of Commons could be trusted to do its duty it had to be reconstructed. When "The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill "was supposed to constitute the political plan of salvation, it stood for much more than any project of representative reform. It embodied vaguely, but really, the measures which it was taken for granted the new House of Commons would be ready to pass. Now the existing franchise has worked such vast changes that even the Labour Party is more con- cerned to test the working powers of the present instrument than to replace it by something better. It may be doubted whether an orator who urged his hearers to give their whole minds to Mr. Asquith's promised Reform Bill, instead of to old-age pensions or unemployment, would find it easy to hold their attention. Theoretically, no doubt, the Labour Party are advocates of universal suffrage. In fact, probably they are fairly contented with that substitute for universal suffrage which they already possess.
Still, this indifference is not likely to last very long. Now that Parliamentary reform has been recalled to life, it can hardly fail to gain more attention as the time for its intro- duction draws nearer. For the first time in the history of the question the distribution of electoral power among those who already possess it promises to be regarded as of more moment than the admission of new claimants to a vote. The large extension of the franchise has helped people to under- stand how little the franchise often means to its possessor. The difficulty of the modern canvasser is not so much to get men to vote for a particular candidate- as to get them to come to the poll. Too often the voter knows that his candidate will not get elected because, though the minority whose views he represents includes an appreciable part of the constituencies, it is only a minority. Now and again, indeed, he dislikes the views of one of the two candi- dates between whom his choice lies so much more than he dislikes those of the other that he is persuaded to forget for one day that he has no real desire to see either of them in Parliament. But quite as often he stays at home and leaves the regular party warfare to take its own course. We do not claim for minorities of this type that they are wiser or better than the majorities who manage to return candidates. We only say that they have as much claim to be represented in Parliament in the measure of their actual strength as any other section of the constituency, and that under our present electoral system they are not represented at all. We accept Mr. Birrell's law that minorities must suffer; we do but plead that they should suffer iu proportion to their deserts, not, as now, in excess of them. At present a minority of millions may have no larger representation than one of hundreds. It is excluded from Parliament by the mere fact that it is not a majority. As regards the two great parties in the State, the balance which is disturbed in one place is redressed in another. If constituency A regularly returns a Liberal, constituency B as regularly returns a Conservative. Of late, indeed, the Labour Party have established their right, if not to be represented themselves, at least to upset the routine course which elections have hitherto followed. But to those scattered minorities which, however large they may be in the aggregate, are powerless in any particular constituency, no means of making their voices heard has yet presented itself. Will another Reform Bill leave them in the same helpless condition?
The arguments which were once urged against propor- tional representation have of late lost even the small force which they once possessed. We are no longer told that the majority must rule, as though this elementary truth were enough of itself to dispose of the claims of minorities even to be heard. Under any system the majority will rule in virtue of such strength as it really has. The fault of the present system is that it enables a. majority to rule in virtue of a strength which, except accidentally, it has not. We are told after almost every Election that if the Ministerialists in Parliament were exactly proportioned to the Ministerialists in the electorate, though the same Government would be in power, it would be there by a much smaller number of votes on a division. We do not wish to rob the successful party of a single fraction of its real strength. What it is in the constituencies, that it should be in the House of Commons. What we do not see is why it should be stronger in the House of Commons than it is out of doors. It may be said that, provided that a Government has a majority in Parliament, it does not matter whether it falls short of its majority in the country or exceeds it. It may not matter to its existence ; but it may matter a great deal to its policy. The possession of an unnaturally large majority is often an invitation to a Govern- ment to make hay while the sun shines, to get laws into the statute-book which with a, smaller majority—a majority more exactly corresponding to the measure of the votes it can command—it would not dream of bringing forward. Even the party which possesses this excessive majority seldom benefits by it in the long run, and in the meantime the action of Parliament does not really express that combination of influences which gives legislation a really permanent character. The object of proportional repre- sentation has been well defined as the securing that while the majority shall rule, all considerable minorities shall be heard. The second ballot, which is demanded in some quarters, would only intensify the real vice of the existing system. As things are, a minority may occasion- ally affect the result of an election. If it cannot return the candidate it prefers, it can sometimes keep out a candidate whom it specially dislikes. The second ballot would deprive it of this chance. It would become as powerless for exclusion as it already is for election. ' Un- satisfactory as the present arrangement is, it would be only made worse by such a change as this. We do not expect the Liberal Government to embody proportional representation in their Reform Bill without knowing more about it than they probably do at present. But it is not unreasonable to demand that they should take steps to inform themselves and the country of what other nations are doing in the same direction, and to ascertain how far the schemes they are trying are fitted for adoption among ourselves.
Nor are we without grounds for hoping that something of this kind will be done. Since the last General Election Mr. Asquith has twice defined what the House of Commons ought to be, and we do not see how it can possibly be made to answer to his definition except by proportional repre- sentation in some form. "If," he said at St. Andrews, " real and genuine and intelligent opinion is more split up than it used to be, and if we cannot now classify everybody by the same simple process, we must accept the new con- ditions and adapt our machinery to them." And at Morley he argued in favour of a House of Commons "which shall fully reflect every strain of opinion" as making democratic government in the long run not only safer and more free, but more stable. These passages certainly point to some change in the method by which we now arrive at the state and purport of public opinion. It is not by simply ascertaining which variety of opinion is strongest in each separate constituency that we shall make the House of Commons "a real reflection and mirror of the national mind." "We are discovering," said Mr. Sidney Webb the other day, "that it is on the scientific treatment of minorities, even of very small minorities, that social well- being depends "; and the first step towards treating a minority scientifically, or even fairly, is to give it the opportunity of Parliamentary expression. The Mother of Parliaments will not, indeed, be the first to recognise this obvious truth. Proportional representation has been adopted in Belgium, in Denmark, and in Sweden, while in France there is a remarkable movement on foot to get it voluntarily applied to municipal elections. M. Yves Guyot gives several instances of this in a letter to this month's issue of Representation, —the ably edited organ of the Society for Promoting Proportional Representation. In 1904 the municipality of St. Brieuc contained twenty. three Radicals, though their voting strength only entitled them to ten seats, and four Liberals, though they also should have had ten. In 1906 the Socialists and Liberals combined to introduce the proportional principle by consent, with the result that the municipality now contains ten Radicals, ten Liberals, and seven Socialists. A similar experiment. in Rheims during the present year has led to a very similar distribution of strength in the City Council. That is the kind of change we should like to see effected in the British House of Commons.
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